I guess this has been said before but I want to reiterate it here.
The 3 button navigation is simpler, much faster than gestures and less prone to input errors than gessure navigation.
It’s easier to use the phone one handed when using 3 buttons especially considering the size of phones nowadays.
The only real downside to the 3 button bar is the space it takes away from the screen. I can’t deny you get better immersion due increased screen size and gestures being intuitive (for me at least.
With that said I understand that depending on the brand the feel of gestures and their quality can vary (like between a pixel phone and a xiaomi device), but in terms of efficiency (and maybe slightly improved battery life due to less animations) and simplicity the 3 button navigation is still miles ahead.
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Once I got used to gestures, I couldn’t go back.
I honestly find it very fast and intuitive.
I don’t think you know what objectively means. You meant to use the word subjectively.
You can’t say something is “objectively” better than. Then proceed to list “subjective” opinions. Clearly you dislike gesture navigation, which is fine, but that doesn’t make it objectively worse.
On a large phone (so almost all of them) gesturing is much easier than reaching for a button. When I first switched it was slightly awkward because of muscle memory, but after a while gestures felt much better.
I prefer gestures, it feels more natural and there is a bigger margin for error, as in I can swipe from anywhere along the bottom to go home or anywhere along the sides to go back. The one downside for me is the left back gesture conflicting with drawer navigation, but apps seem to be moving away from that anyway
I have my navigation buttons turned off for years now, so I couldn’t disagree more.
Same. I recently showed someone my pixel and they asked if it’s possible to use buttons instead of gestures, so I showed them and it felt so weird.
That’s one hell of a controversial opinion.
I personally prefer gestures. I find them quicker (you don’t have to move your fingers as much to do anything, especially back gesture) and more intuitive (like swiping on the navigation pill or whatever it’s called to quickly switch apps, much better than double clicking recents button). Gestures also integrate nicely with the rest of os (like swiping from backspace to erase whole words in gboard).
One thing I hate and I can’t understand how that’s not fixed in stock AOSP is opening left side menus (those hamburger ones) with gestures enabled. Half of the time instead of opening the menu it will just go back, even if sensitivity on left edge is set to minimum.
This is something that custom roms address nicely as most of the time setting sensitivity to minimum would actually disable gestures in this area (take note Google). If this is something that’s bugging anyone, you can disable gestures on left edge over adb (without root) with:
adb shell settings put secure back_gesture_inset_scale_left 0or with:su -c "settings put secure back_gesture_inset_scale_left 0"if you have root access (for more info look here).Gestures are faster and more intuitive. You don’t have to do hand gymnastics just to get to the recents apps screen or to go back. The gesture bar can be hidden and it will still work, unlike the buttons which you have to swipe up to bring back, and even when shown it doesn’t take up much screen real estate. Apple got it right when they brought gestures to the iPhone and I’m glad Google copied.
